The Germans and the East

Before Colonization

17 Before฀Colonization Christendom฀at฀the฀Slav฀Frontier฀฀ and฀Pagan฀Resistance ◆฀฀฀Christian฀Lübke฀฀฀◆ Relations between Germans and Slavs have mostly been made a subject of discussion related to the expansion of Germany in the high and late medieval periods, when Slavs were superseded by German colonists immigrating to the eastern parts of the European continent. In recent decades modern research in Germany has overcome the idea that this historical process rested upon a cultural superiority of immigrants who completely replaced the inferior Slavs. In modern German historiography the term Germania Slavica has come to signify the interaction of German- and Slavonic -speaking peoples during the colonization period1 when a process of linguistic unification and ethnic intermixture produced, in the words of Walter Schlesinger, the German Neustämme2 (unlike the Altstämme to the west of the rivers Elbe, Saale and Enns) and by this means the German people itself. In this way Germania Slavica conceptualizes the Slavonic share in German history that up to the present is evident in the existence of special place and personal names in the German-Slavonic contact zone. The Slavonic place names and especially the mixed Slavonic-German names reflect the collaboration between Germans and Slavs in the settlement process of the High Middle Ages (aedificatio terrae, or Landesausbau).3 Naturally, a fair estimation of these interactions must take into consideration the German-Slavonic contacts in the centuries prior to this process and, above all, the originally prevailing Slavonic conditions. Leaving out the discussions on the chronology of the settlement of the Slavs in the eastern parts of Central Europe and on the possible contacts between Germanic remnants and the Slavs in the region between the Elbe and the Oder Rivers,4 the starting point of such a discussion might be the conceptualization of the vast regions 18 ◆ CHRISTIAN LÜBKE between the Western Roman (Frankish, and especially East-Frankish) and Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empires as a political and cultural “gray area,” as it was characterized by the Polish historian Alexander Gieysztor.5 This estimation is based on the observation that there were only few impulses for exchange between the Slavonic groups which scarcely differed among each other in their ways of life and in their material culture and which produced merely regional structures in their political organization. But stimuli came from the periphery since the ninth century and were transmitted by transit trade that provided regional rulers the means to maintain strong armed retinues (druěiny) by employing silver coins, weapons and luxury goods from the Muslim world.6 Such export commodities that were introduced to long-distance trade originated from tributes and taxes paid in food (grain) and forest products (honey, wax, furs), but the biggest profit was earned from the sale of slaves, principally war hostages. These were the economic structures that allowed the rise of the first Slavonic empire on the periphery of the East Frankish Empire in the ninth century, Greater Moravia. It was followed by the realms of the East European native princely dynasties after the tenth century, the Rjurikids in Old Russia (i.e. Kievan Rus), the Piasts in Poland, the Premyslids in Bohemia and the Árpads in Hungary.7 But such powerful princes did penetrate into the Elbe region, i.e. into the immediate neighborhood of the East Frankish Empire and its successor kingdom ruled by the Saxon Ottonians in the tenth century, who for a time participated in this system. Quite the contrary, the map of the Polabian Slavs8 shows a variety of autonomous tribes that only partly formed federations or were bound together by temporarily ruling princes.9 It seems as if this part of the Slavonic world in particular preserved archaic forms of life and political organization,10 as these acephalous and “segmental” societies kept their traditional creeds and freedom from princely domination more successfully and longer than any others. The beginning of a real, planned “eastern policy”11 by Germany’s rulers toward their Slavonic neighbors becomes evident during the reign of King Henry I “The Fowler” (919–936). Yet the West had already begun to exert its influence on the Slavonic societies at the end of the eighth century when Charlemagne decided to control the approaches to his empire in the East by making war on the tribes of the Abodrites and Wilzes in the North, as well as on the Sorbs (east of Thuringia) and Czech tribal princes. The interest in and knowledge of...